Violence flares on the picket line at Tilmanatone Colliery near Dover on Sept. 4, 1984. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took on the mine workers' union. / AP

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

LONDON -- As prime minister for more than 11 years, Margaret Thatcher stood up to communism, transformed the United Kingdom's welfare state, liberalized its financial markets and wrought political changes that inspired and divided generations alike.

But on the home front perhaps most of all she changed the way people in Britain lived every day, especially how they conducted business.

"Virgin wouldn't be flying from Heathrow if it wasn't for her believing in competition," said Richard Branson, the English businessman and chairman of the Virgin Group, on Monday.

"She really did set the groundwork for entrepreneurialism and business in Britain," he said. "Standing back and watching what she achieved, she made mistakes but was willing to make tough decisions and I admired her tenacity."

When Thatcher was named prime minister in 1979, England was in disarray. The economy was not growing, unemployment had reached record highs, commercial enterprises were under state control and public labor unions were pushing hard, sometimes violently, for major pay increases.

Thatcher believed the answer was to get government out of business.

She privatized big, state-owned industries that were losing money, including the nation's utility companies and its national airline, British Airways. Shipping, railways and car manufacturing were also opened up to the free market.

Some of the firms that were directly impacted by Thatcher's experiment with privatization: BP, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar. But the importance she attached to the market was more than just an economic belief system.

"Privatization ... was fundamental to improving Britain's economic performance," Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. "But for me it was also far more than that: it was one of the central means of reversing the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism."

When Thatcher assumed power inflation was running at 20%, and more than 1.5 million people -- an unprecedented number at the time -- were of out of work.

The environment for business was "very bad in a number of ways," said Steve Davies of the Institute for Economic Affairs. Many industries, due to the stranglehold of the trade unions, were "virtually ungovernable," he said.

Thatcher took on the powerful National Union of Mineworkers in 1984 in what she described as a fight to determine who runs the country, unions or the elected government. The miners used violent protests to blocking the closing of some of the nation's coal mines. Thatcher backed police confrontations. In the end, the mines were closed and the rest privatized.

Inflation and joblessness eventually fell, and under Thatcher the United Kingdom experienced several years of economic growth.

"Her policies turned Britain around when it was facing many similar problems to some of the eurozone countries today in terms of stagnation and low growth," said Raoul Ruparel of the Open Europe think tank.

"I think we are already starting to see some people discuss whether the policies that she espoused in the 1980s were the starting point or the root cause of what became a massive financial bubble. It's hard to trace it back to those policies, but that approach obviously played a role," he said.

Lord Sugar, a British businessman who came of age during the Thatcher years, said she led the way to a worldwide push for more free markets.

"Baroness Thatcher in the 1980s kick started the entrepreneurial revolution that allowed chirpy chappies to succeed and not just the elite," he said.

Thatcher explained her vision years later for Reason magazine.

"Privatization shrinks the power of the state and free enterprise enlarges the power of the people," she said. "The policies we introduced ... were fiercely opposed. Too many people and industries preferred to rely on easy subsidies rather than apply the financial discipline necessary to cut their costs and become competitive.

"But we understood that a system of free enterprise has a universal truth at its heart: to create a genuine market in a state you have to take the state out of the market," she said.

Oliver Foster, a public affairs consultant at Pagefield Communications, said her policies, radical at the time, brought Britain back from self-destruction.

"We are still reaping the benefits of those changes that she brought in both in terms of allowing the private sector the freedom it required and trying to claw back some of the control and power that the state had gained in previous years and give people the freedom that they were so desperately after whether it be individuals in buying their own homes or people setting up businesses," Foster said.

Not all agree. Some say her policies have led to a global economic crisis.

"Thatcher was responsible for removing restraints on the financial markets â?? leading the way internationally â?? which led to the mess we're in now," said Adam Parker-Rhodes, 72, in London.